Modern operating systems drive many of today's technology-based innovations by offering a platform for both hardware and software development while serving many diverse needs. These systems have evolved from more simplistic file management systems to more complex workstations that provide high-end performance at reasonable cost. Such systems often include multi-processing architectures, high-speed memory, advanced peripheral devices, a variety of system libraries and components to aid software development, and intricate/interleaved bus architectures, for example. At the heart of these systems are sophisticated operating systems that manage not only computer-related hardware but, a vast array of software components having various relationships. These components are often described in terms of objects or classes having multi-tiered relationships such as in a hierarchical tree arrangement for files and directories that are found in many data management systems.
Emerging technologies have spawned other type structures and models for storing and managing objects within a database. These include such hierarchical structures as containment hierarchies that enable multiple relationships between respective items or objects. Such hierarchies are often modeled as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and support multiple path relationships to an item from a root node of the containment hierarchy. Regardless of the type of data structure involved, however, security models have been applied to these systems to determine and facilitate how entities (e.g., users or other components) are permitted access to objects or items residing in the respective structures.
Particularly on computer networks, management of permission to access and/or modify objects and/or items (e.g., files) can be a difficult and tedious task. Conventional system(s) in which endpoint system(s) are required to ascertain whether a particular user possesses the necessary credentials to access and/or modify a particular item can result in significant computing overhead.